Digital Uncanny

Abstract

We are confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as déjà vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today’s uncanny refers to how nonhuman devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, intimating we are machines and our behavior is predicable because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings we get when we question whether our responses are subjective or automated—automated as in reducing one’s subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one’s genuinely subjective—yet effectively preset—response. This anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop we have produced by designing software that studies our traces, inputs, and moves. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of “self,” “affect,” “feedback,” and “aesthetic experience,” forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and our relationship to others and our experience of the world.

Digitality: A reality check

“…The pervasion of digitality influences many cultural aspects, such as (especially interactive) art (King 2015;Chau 2017;Seevinck 2017;Ravetto-Biagioli 2019), performance (Whatley et al 2018), and even clothing through smart textiles (Schneegass & Amft 2017). Museums provide experiences that have increasingly digital facets that require new areas of design expertise (Vereeren et al 2018).…”

Dancing with and within the Digital Domain

“…8. For a longer discussion of the relation of feedback to interactive dance performances, see Ravetto-Biagioli (2019).…”

‘Fake news’ as infrastructural uncanny

“…Several scholars have explored the notion of the ‘digital uncanny’, arguing that we should attend to how the uncanny may be re-articulated through different media technologies (Coyne, 2005; Ravetto-Biagioli, 2016). Ravetto-Biagioli (2019) argues that with digital technologies, the uncanny may exceed the ‘emotional intensity or embodied perception’ that was the focus of earlier psychoanalytical readings, instead ‘forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media’. The case of junk news suggests that it is partly the agential capacities of digital infrastructures to configure, multiply and redistribute habits and relations in unexpected ways which generate unsettling ambiguities.…”